There’s a new cool feature in Google Webmaster Tools. Select your site and click on Labs > Site performance. “This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users”. That said what you get is a performance graph overview along with page speed suggestions. This is all nice and cool stuff. I love it.

Using Google’s words, this is an example page from my site and some suggestions on how to optimize it:

Details: Save up to 13.6 KB, 8 requests, 5 DNS lookups and here’s the break down.

Enable gzip compression

Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 13.6 KB:
Go to URL http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (13.6 KB)

Seriously, Google wants me to gzip their script on their servers? No, i guess not. I can try fetching the script every few hours and deliver it from my server but will Google like that? Will i get punished or miss a very important update?

Combine external JavaScript

There’s a bunch of Facebook Connect and local .js files. Google’s suggestions are 90% accurate.

Minimize DNS lookups

The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains:

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js

http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/swf/XdComm.swf

http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/pestaola.json?

http://www.facebook.com/extern/login_status.php?

http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js

5 domain lookups in total. 2 looking for Google itself. It’s AdSense and Analytics that my blog is looking a response from. This counts for almost 50 percent of the DNS lookups Google suggests to serve from existing domains. Fetching show_ads.js and ga.js every few hours, deliver them locally and start worrying if i’ll miss an important update or get punished for doing so? Not to mention Facebook.

Combine external CSS

2 CSS files Google suggests to become one. Google is right.

Google’s obsession with speed has just reached a ridiculous point. I’m all down to speed and uber fast loading web pages but the thought of messing with AdSense’s and Analytics’ scripts it’s insane. If Google considers loading time and speed as an extra variable for PR i’m all down to that but first they need to:

1. make sure all their AdSense, Analytics and other .js scripts are served from a single domain
2. explain what the complications will be, if any, for fetching-serving locally AdSense, Analytics and other .js scripts
3. provide detail guidelines in Google Code like Using Google Public DNS

I’m a speed demon myself but as for now i’m three quarters angel at pestaola.gr

Update: Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet